Churnalism and plagiarism?

If I copied and pasted parts of a scientific article into a blog post, and passed it off as my own writing, what would you say about that? I hope that everyone would be appalled. What about if it was from a press release? This is something that is clearly intended for consumption by the media, but if I copy, paste and claim it is my own writing what would that be called?

This is called science churnalism:

“Churnalism is an article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added” (From FAQ of http://www.churnalism.com)

I encourage everyone to read the Guardian article on the topic, and to visit www.churnalism.com. It is a site that compares text from news articles and press releases and highlights where text has been copied and pasted. I think it could be a very useful resource, but an additional manual check of the comparison is probably necessary to weed out false positives.

What do I think on it? As has been previously mentioned, journalism as a whole is subject to enormous time pressures and to be the first to publish. That is probably close to being something of a truism. Science journalism is no different but in my mind, copying passages verbatim from a press release is no different from plagiarism. Copying from a press release and not acknowledging this makes it very difficult to determine where reported information is coming from. I’ll leave you with a quote from Martin Robbins, who puts what he thinks of Churnalism better than I could:

“There’s nothing wrong with curating content to pass on for a wider audience – Ed Yong and I do that daily on Twitter – but if journalists aren’t contributing original reporting, or providing context, or challenging statements made by university press officers, or even just adding informed opinion, then they’re not really doing journalism. At a time when we need to develop new models to support professional journalism online, that may not be a wise path to travel too far down.” (From Guardian article 25/04/11)